Mandated vaccinations, or vaccinations administered without
the recipient's knowledge or fully informed consent, begs
what is perhaps the most fundamental of all questions: Who
owns our bodies? We believe that we are in control of our
lives and, therefore, own ourselves. But, if
someone outside of ourself has the authority to subject us
to medical experimentation without our knowledge or fully
informed consent, then we cannot logically argue ownership
of ourselves any more convincingly than a laboratory
animal, can we?

By Michael P. Wright

An article entitled The Complicated Task of
Monitoring Vaccine Safety appeared in the Public
Health Reports of January/February 1997. This is a
publication of the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services. The authors were Susan Ellenberg and Robert Chen.
Below is an excerpt from their rather revealing synopsis:

Yet despite vaccines' clear effectiveness in reducing risks
of diseases ... vaccination policies are not without
controversy. Vaccines, like all other pharmaceutical
products, are not entirely risk-free; while most known side
effects are minor and self-limited, some vaccines have been
associated with very rare but serious adverse effects.
Because such rare effects are often not evident until
vaccines come into widespread use, the Federal government
maintains ongoing surveillance programs to monitor vaccine
safety. The interpretation of data from such programs is
complex and associated with substantial uncertainty. A
continual effort to monitor these data effectively and to
develop more precise ways of assessing risks of vaccines is
necessary to ensure public confidence in immunization
programs.

The writers admit that the clinical trials of vaccines
are not sufficient to identify and measure the risk levels
associated with adverse events. In effect, the vaccinated
population itself becomes an experimental group. They also
admit that there is substantial uncertainty
associated with interpretation of data from surveillance
programs.

Further, the writers do not see any need to assess the
belief that vaccines are effective and good for public
health. They accept this view as a postulate. They see the
questioning of vaccination programs by some members of the
public as a problem, and the only challenge for them is to
defeat the skepticism.

For those who remain skeptical, consideration of problems
of vaccine safety should take place with the common
statistical concept of the normal distribution (bell-shaped
curve) in mind. An old statistics book from my college
days provides a good starting point for the argument:

...it is interesting to note that a very large number of
random variables observed in nature possess a frequency
distribution which is approximately bell-shaped or, as the
statistician would say, is approximately a normal
probability distribution.

~William Mendenhall
Introduction to Statistics, p. 116

In nature we have all kinds of measureable events and
phenomena. Some humans are tall, some are short, but most
are of medium height. Regarding adverse events to
vaccines, some are very mild, and some are very serious.
We can expect the normal adverse event to be somewhere in
between. If all adverse events were known and scored by
severity level, the results expressed as a graph most
likely would form a bell-shaped curve. At one end of the
curve would be the rare catastrophic adverse
effects and at the other end the mild effects such as
temporary redness and swelling without other problems.
The big question is: What do we have under the hump of the
curve?

The writers for Public Health Reports use the phrase
known side effects, and assure us that most are
minor and self-limited. Are there unknown
adverse effects which develop later in childhood or adult
life and which have not been recognized as consequences of
vaccination? (See bell curve below)

From what we know about normal distributions we would
expect that in the middle would be the most common types of
adverse events -- those less serious than the rare
catastrophes noted contemporaneously with vaccinations but
still serious enough to be figured into the process of
weighing risks versus benefits (if there are any) of
vaccination. I propose that the adverse effects include
neurological damage from repeated doses of mercury and
other factors in vaccines and that these problems manifest
at a later stage of childhood development in the form of
behavioral disorders and learning disability in many of our
youth. This kind of adverse event has not been recognized
by the vaccine-pushers in government and industry. It
needs to be researched and the risk levels need to be
measured.

How I came to question official wisdom about vaccines

In the 90s I was awarded four federal grants from the Small
Business Innovation Research program of the U.S. Public
Health Service. My general task was the creation and
testing of microcomputer software which provided anonymous
assessment of risk for current infection by HIV. I also
applied the concept to chlamydia and hepatitis B.

One of my tasks, reported in the American Journal of
Preventive Medicine (Sept/Oct 1997), was to conduct a
hepatitis B vaccination project using a computer-operated
telephone interview. In 1996 I also attended an
immunization conference in Washington, D.C., sponsored by
the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and there was a
preliminary report of my project published in the
conference abstracts.

My computer system was successful in persuading anonymous
callers to present themselves at a clinic for vaccination,
if assessed to be at elevated risk of contracting hepatitis
B, due to behavior or occupational circumstances. I was
interested only in promoting voluntary vaccination of
adults and adolescents. The software's rule-based
decision-making system incorporated guidelines published by
the CDC in the early 90s.

As reported in the Am J Prev Med, 47% of those so
instructed by the computer followed up at a collaborating
clinic for vaccination. My system was very innovative and,
in fact, state-of-the-art for the use of computers for
medical diagnostic decision support (MDDS). I was the first
in the medical press to report using a system of this
nature, operated over a telephone, to persuade callers to
follow up at a clinic and to track the success rate in
doing so.

American public health agencies not interested

Unfortunately, I learned at the 1996 CDC conference that my
system did not have a chance of being implemented by
American public health agencies. Other literature at the
conference indicated that the big push was on for
indiscriminate universal vaccination of infants for
hepatitis B. Since the virus is blood-borne and contracted
by behaviors and risk situations that usually don't emerge
until adolescence or adulthood, I think this practice is
both wasteful and hazardous from the standpoint of adverse
effects from vaccination. At the conference I noticed many
booths of pharmaceutical companies.

British vaccine-pusher calls me Hopelessly
wrong

In particular I remember one meeting in which there was a
discussion about vaccine safety. During the question and
comment period I made the statement that the decision to
vaccinate for a particular disease should be based upon the
comparison of two risks:

1. the risk of contracting a serious illness if not
vaccinated; and

2. the risk of a serious adverse event if vaccinated.

I recall that two CDC officials expressed stern
disagreement with my statement. I also remember being told
by an arrogant British doctor that I was hopelessly
wrong. Vaccine safety advocate Kristine Severyn
identified him to me as being on the payroll of a
pharmaceutical company. She is with the Ohio Parents for
Vaccine Safety.

This was a disillusioning experience. I notice recently
that my same concerns about comparing the risks on both
sides of the decision were expressed in a USA Today article
of December 13, 2002 (page 5A). This article was about the
smallpox vaccine. The headline was very dramatic:
For 60 Million, the Cure May Kill. Writer
Steve Sternberg describes the ordeal of a sickly child
named Melissa Schweitzer:

Doctors didn't figure out until Melissa was 11 that she
lacked a natural supply of three infection-fighting
antibodies, [a condition] which put her at risk of massive
infection -- from the live virus, called vaccinia, used
to make the smallpox vaccine.

AIDS dissent

Two of my grants for computer software were for the purpose
of providing assessment of risk of current infection by
HIV. This is a long story which I would like to tell before
an investigatory congressional committee. Suffice it to say
for right now that the waste, fraud, and mismanagement in
the federal AIDS program, which I believe is based upon
seriously flawed science, also obstructed the
implementation of this project. For details see this part
of my AIDS dissent website:

In the fall of 2002, health educators at the
University of Oklahoma were distributing a Planned
Parenthood brochure, probably paid for by CDC AIDS money,
which erroneously reports that there are from one to two
million HIV-infected persons in the USA. In fact, the
upper limit of the last CDC estimate was 900,000. There was
never any justification for an estimate of 1 to 2
million. The brochure is entitled Some Things
You Should Know About HIV & AIDS and was produced
by Planned Parenthood of Central Oklahoma. It also says
it was revised in November 2000.

There is much to criticize about the flaws in American
medical culture. We are over-medicalized, over-drugged,
over-vaccinated, and over-diagnosed. A good argument was
made along these lines by Richard D. Lamm, former governor
of Colorado. It is entitled The Ethics of
Excess, and is in Public Health Reports, May/June
1996. No. 3.